Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1600 BC

The world in 1600 BC

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TL;DR — Kush was ruled from Kerma, the Nebra sky disc went into the ground, Tarim Basin herders were buried with cheese, and the Indus world had scattered into small settlements.

On a hilltop near Nebra in central Germany, a bronze disc inlaid with gold was buried alongside swords, bracelets and a chisel. Far up the Nile, a king the Egyptians called the “ruler of Kush” probably held both halves of Nubia from Kerma. In Mesopotamia, observations of Venus made under a Babylonian king still decide how this era is dated. Herders in the Tarim Basin were burying their dead with cheese, the Indus world had broken up into small settlements, rice may have been arriving in Korea, and Australia may not yet have had dingoes.

Africa

Kush, upstream of Egypt, had pushed north into Lower Nubia. David O’Connor of the Penn Museum, writing in Expedition magazine in 1971, dated the royal burials of the “rulers of Kush” at Kerma, partly excavated in 1912-1914, to about 1670-1570 BC, and wrote that around 1650 BC the Kushites occupied the Egyptian forts in Lower Nubia; one contemporary Egyptian inscription treated the Kushite king as the equal of the Asiatic king in the north and the Egyptian king in the south, a break with the usual Egyptian way of describing foreign rulers. In a 1993 article in the same magazine, O’Connor summarized Charles Bonnet’s excavations of the town itself: a walled core of about 6 hectares with a large temple, a circular audience hall, a palace and many elite houses, enlarged by outer settlements to some 25 hectares; on that evidence he called Kerma the earliest known city in Africa outside Egypt.

West Asia

Observations of Venus made under Ammisaduqa, a king of Babylon, are one reason the year 1600 BC is hard to place in Mesopotamian history. Sturt W. Manning and colleagues, writing in PLoS ONE in 2016, note that rival chronologies for the earlier second millennium BC have stood up to 150 years or more apart despite more than a century of work on the tablets. Their tree-ring and radiocarbon dating of timbers from Kültepe and Acemhöyük in Turkey, tied to documents naming Assyrian officials, fits only the so-called Middle Chronology. Under a Low-Middle version of that scheme, they suggest, the poor viewing conditions recorded in Ammisaduqa’s 12th and 13th years would fall in 1627-1626 BC, when tree rings across the northern hemisphere show growth anomalies plausibly caused by a large volcanic eruption.

Europe

Near the town of Nebra in Saxony-Anhalt, the disc now known as the Nebra Sky Disc was placed in a hoard on the summit of the Mittelberg, along with two swords, two spiral bracelets, a chisel and other objects. Sebastian Dieck, Harald Meller and colleagues, writing in Scientific Reports in 2024, date the deposit by those objects to the end of the central European Early Bronze Age, about 1600 BC, and consider it highly likely that the disc had been made 100 to 200 years before. Their metallographic study found that it began as a flat casting that was heated and forged about 10 times, spiraling out from the center to the rim. Unlicensed metal detectorists dug it up and took it from the hill in 1999.

East Asia

Rice may have been reaching the Korean peninsula. A 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by Oliver E. Craig at the University of York, gives a 90% range of 1677-1161 BC for the first rice in Korea’s Early Mumun Bronze Age, about 2,000 years after millet came in from northeast China, and notes that earlier dates have been proposed. Japan still belonged to the Jomon hunter-gatherers, who also tended soybean, adzuki bean, chestnut, lacquer and other plants; the same paper puts the arrival of rice in northern Kyushu as early as the late second millennium BC, in a range of 1251-872 BC.

South Asia

In the northwest of the subcontinent, a countryside of smaller places had replaced the Indus cities. Adam S. Green and Cameron A. Petrie, in a 2018 paper in the Journal of Field Archaeology, date the Indus Civilization’s settlement record to about 2600-1600 BC and describe a shift from a small number of large urban centers among many small settlements to a dispersed pattern. Around the old city of Rakhigarhi, Late Harappan sites were more numerous than those of the urban phase and generally close to them, while in the northwestern corner of the area the authors studied the number of settlements dropped sharply; they caution that part of the apparent shift may come from the methods of earlier surveys.

Central Asia

In the Tarim Basin, the people buried at the Xiaohe cemetery were laid in boat-shaped wooden coffins covered with cattle hides and marked by timber poles or oars. Fan Zhang and colleagues, writing in Nature in 2021, note that many of the Tarim mummies dating to 1650-1450 BC were buried with lumps of cheese, and that milk proteins in the dental calculus of the earliest Xiaohe individuals point to dairy herding from the site’s founding. Genomes of 13 people from the basin dated to about 2100-1700 BC showed only local ancestry, which does not support older theories deriving the mummies from Afanasievo herders or from the Bactria-Margiana oasis culture.

The Americas

Painters in the rock shelters of southwest Texas and northern Mexico were working in a style that had already lasted thousands of years. Karen L. Steelman and colleagues, writing in Science Advances in 2025, obtained 57 direct radiocarbon dates and 25 oxalate dates for pictographs at 12 sites and estimate that Pecos River style painting began between 5760 and 5385 calibrated years before present and probably ended between 1370 and 1035 years before present. The murals cover the walls and ceilings of at least 150 rock shelters north of the Rio Grande, and the team found that eight of the murals they studied were planned as compositions that followed a set of rules.

Oceania

Dingoes may not yet have reached Australia. Jane Balme, Sue O’Connor and Stewart Fallon, writing in Scientific Reports in 2018, directly dated dingo bones from Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain, the oldest known archaeological context for the animal, to between 3348 and 3081 years ago, later than the 5000-4000 years ago most often quoted for its arrival. With no land bridge to Southeast Asia, they consider an arrival without people unlikely, and they describe the dingo as the only hard evidence of outside visitors to mainland Australia between first Indigenous settlement and about 400 years ago.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
Song Letter. (2026, October 11). The world in 1600 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1600-bc/
Chicago
Song Letter. “The world in 1600 BC.” Our Earth's History, October 11, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1600-bc/.
MLA
Song Letter. “The world in 1600 BC.” Our Earth's History, 11 Oct. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1600-bc/.

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